It suffers in Act 3 from what all prequels suffer from, the need to get cutesy and show the audience, "Look! It's that thing!" The final 15 minutes are supposed to make me geek out... but whoever really wanted to see a movie explaining in great detail what the Space Jockey was? When we should be seeing some sort of character resolution, we're going out of our way to show the genesis of the alien-- without the burden of being a prequel, I wonder if the film could have ended in a more satisfying way, allowing the film to stand alone.

The visuals are extraordinary. Simply incredible. Cinematog and Effects Oscar noms and maybe wins. Fassbender was fantastic, as was Rapace-- the rest are fine but don't have too much to do. Guy Pearce was a distraction.

For a movie with such smarts when it came to philosophy and technology, certain things seemed pretty arbitrary and confusing-- why did dude come back to the ship as an angry extra-strong guy? Why, when LMG ingested a drop of it, did he have an alien in his eye, an awesome image that doesn't seem to make much sense? Why does the infection cause sperm to turn to fast-growing aliens? Logic seemed to take backseat to creepiness and visual splendor, which in a regular blockbuster I have zero problem with but in something with so much to offer I get bothered by.

Parts of it left me breathless. Other parts left me frustrated.